This Thursday, November 14, the “sustainable transition” was at the heart of the VSE Conference in which 160 companies participated.
There was talk of sustainability, adaptation to crises, agility, cooperation, artificial intelligence* too… even “transmission”. This Thursday, November 14, at the Château de Malmont, in Villeneuvette, some 160 representatives of VSEs discussed “Sustainable transition”, the key theme of the third edition of the Assises de la VSE organized by Sydel Pays Cœur d'Hérault. Among the witnesses of the exercise, Bernard Manguin, boss of the Blason chocolate factory, captured the audience through a sincere, direct, concrete testimony of his experience. Faced with the cocoa crisis, the explosion in energy costs… and with a fierce desire to maintain jobs and recognized quality, the business leader recounted his “transitions”, those of his “box” of chocolates…
The very essence of the business
Reorganization on a 4-day week (which saves energy), revision of processes to save time, material investments in a tense economic context, supply refocused on the premises…, the Clermontais pulled out all the stops to complete vital changes to its business. Because, in the world of small businesses, or even the economy in the broad sense, “the transition is all the time, it’s permanent”concluded the one who made a point of honor to “to transmit” in front of dozens of players in the local economy, business leaders and students.
Transition and solidarity…
National and departmental context obliges, in the introduction of the Conference, Jean-François Soto, president of the Pays Cœur d'Hérault and departmental advisor did not fail to emphasize “the seriousness of the overall situation, today, on public finances and at state level… Today, everyone must adapt. The department of Hérault is experiencing a particularly worrying situation while it It is the local institution that supports the actors We need each other more than ever: private and public initiatives This can only be done if we concatenate all the chains of action to create. wealth, solidarity with the people, but also territorial solidarity. In this sense, we must be innovative and carry this forward.”
In an ecosystem where injunctions sometimes seem paradoxical, the question of ZAN, Zero Net Artificialization, was logically raised, in particular by Frédéric Roig, president of the Sydel eco commission. “Companies have technical, material needs, land needs. How can we reconcile development with the reality of town planning, in particular the ZAN which is one of the major elements of the government's environmental policy in recent years? complex for an elected official…”noted the man who is also President of the AMF 34.
Building connections, a factor of resilience
Zooming out from local, even national, concerns, Isabelle Delannoy, specialist in the sustainable economy and author of the book “The Symbiotic Economy”, emphasized that “the mass of our human infrastructure is today greater than the living biomass on earth. We passed the threshold in the mid-2010s”. Borrowing a plant metaphor, she invited entrepreneurs to forge close ties at the heart of an economic biotope that Sydel strives to grow: “Fabric is a factor of security and resilience… 80% of your needs can be solved locally.”
